Vivek Astvansh, McGill University

Imagine: You’re in charge of marketing for a major automaker, and your biggest competitor just recalled thousands of vehicles. Now customers are worried about the safety of cars like yours. Do you seize the moment and ramp up advertising to steal market share? Or do you pull back on ads, fearing that customers will connect your brand with the bad press?

For what marketing professors like me call “substitute brands,” this sort of dilemma pops up all the time. Whether it’s a product recall, a customer data breach or a scandal, bad news for one brand can shake customers’ confidence in an entire product category.

The big question: Should competitors respond by increasing or decreasing their advertising? And will these adjustments help or hurt sales?

At first glance, the answer might seem obvious. More ad spending should mean bigger market share, right? But the reality is more complex. In a recent study looking at how 62 car brands responded to a 2014 recall, my colleagues and I found that, on average, when a rival brand issues a recall, its competitors cut their ad spending in half. In other words, most brands treat a rival’s crisis as a threat rather than an opportunity.

And when we looked at the ads’ content, we saw something even more interesting. When a rival brand stumbled, we found substitutes boosted their price-focused advertising by 25% on average, likely in an attempt to attract deal seekers. At the same time, they cut quality-focused advertising by 71%, possibly to avoid drawing unwanted comparisons.

And here’s the kicker: This strategy works.

We found, on average, a rival’s recall raises a substitute’s monthly sales by 35.3% – and the more a brand pulls back on ad spending, the greater the effect. So, when a competitor falters, the best response isn’t necessarily to shout louder. Instead, the data suggests a smarter play: Spend strategically, focus on price messaging, and avoid drawing attention to quality comparisons.

How we did our work

To understand how brands respond when a competitor faces a crisis, we focused on a real-world case: Volkswagen’s recall of nearly half a million cars branded under the Sagitar model in October 2014. This provided the perfect opportunity to study how rival brands adjusted their advertising strategies.

We identified Sagitar’s substitute models – 62 other sedans in the A-class category, sold by more than 30 manufacturers – and collected data on sales and ad spending across 308 media markets in the months before and after the recall. We then did a statistical analysis, controlling for several other variables that could influence ad spending.

Why it matters

Prior research offers mixed guidance on how a substitute brand should adjust its ad spending after a rival’s marketing crisis. Anecdotal evidence from the automotive and consumer goods industries is also mixed. For example, after Samsung recalled its Galaxy Note 7 in 2016 due to faulty batteries, competing phonemakers aggressively ramped up their advertising in an attempt to increase their market share.

Similarly, in 2010, after a Toyota recall, General Motors offered incentives for Toyota owners to switch to a GM car. GM’s chief marketing officer positioned these incentives as GM’s way to meet car buyers’ desire for peace of mind, and reports suggest that GM’s and other rival carmakers’ sales increased following Toyota’s recall.

But my team’s research suggests that this sort of strategy might not be the best one. Sometimes, saying less actually says more.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Vivek Astvansh, Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing and Analytics, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lee Rafuse Haines, University of Notre Dame and Pilar Pérez Romero, University of Notre Dame

Humans have an exceptional ability to deal with viruses. In most cases, your immune system is able to fight an infection. On the other hand, your body provides a spa-like environment that is temperate and stable, optimal for viruses to replicate. Human behavior, including close contact with animals and frequent travel, also increases the likelihood of becoming infected.

From the perspective of viruses spread by insects, or arboviruses, making the evolutionary leap from insects to humans is a tough battle. Viruses cannot replicate very well in humans, which means transmission from mosquitoes is often very difficult.

One might think arboviruses continually evolve in ways that enable them to infect more species. But do they?

We are a virologist and an entomologist who study insect-borne and viral diseases and how human and insect immune systems respond to invading pathogens. Our work provides insights on the complex journey of an arbovirus as it cycles between insect and vertebrate hosts.

As an example, let’s use a Togavirus, the mosquito-transmitted arbovirus that causes eastern equine encephalitis, or EEE. This rare but serious disease can cause a potentially fatal neurological condition in humans and horses. Although EEE is primarily endemic to the eastern United States, its incidence in recent years has increased in regions farther north, with several reported cases in states such as Michigan, Massachusetts and New York.

From animals to mosquitoes

A female mosquito’s inner workings – particularly its guts and salivary glands – create the perfect environment for a virus to flourish.

When a mosquito bites an infected nonhuman host, such as a sick bird, the virus is transported with freshly ingested blood into the mosquito’s midgut – the equivalent to the human stomach and intestines where food is stored and digested. The virus quickly infects midgut cells to avoid a hostile digestive environment and quietly replicates without activating the mosquito’s immune pathways.

Within days, the virus will be released by damaged midgut cells to migrate to the mosquito’s salivary glands, where it will be positioned for transmission. Now, each time the mosquito feeds, it will pump virus-saturated saliva into its new animal host and continue the disease transmission cycle.

It is easy for the virus to avoid detection by the mosquito’s relatively primitive immune system. Compared with humans, the immune system of mosquitoes can launch only a generalized and overall less effective attack on pathogens. This means an arbovirus can usually establish a persistent, lifelong, almost symbiotic infection without damaging the mosquito’s health, perfect for the virus to disseminate itself.

Mosquitoes have evolved over millions of years to become tolerant to arboviral infections. This relationship has allowed the mosquito to maintain viral populations without having to launch energy-expensive immune responses. However, this does not mean mosquitoes are just passive virus carriers. An arbovirus can change how infected mosquitoes behave or reproduce.

For example, viruses can manipulate mosquitoes in two ways: by making them feed more frequently, and by increasing their attraction to infected hosts. However, this behavior puts the mosquito at greater risk of being killed by irritated hosts who notice the repeated biting attempts. Arboviruses can also affect mosquito reproduction by sometimes reducing the number of eggs a female mosquito produces and increasing the length of time it takes for the eggs to mature. In some cases, these viruses can even sterilize female mosquitoes.

Arboviruses have evolved to expertly use mosquitoes as both transportation vehicles and breeding grounds. By spreading and multiplying without severely harming their insect hosts, these viruses ensure their own survival and continued transmission.

From mosquitoes to humans

The virus must overcome several barriers to successfully colonize a human host.

The initial step for successful disease transmission – the virus’s ultimate goal – is perhaps the easiest: The EEE virus infects humans when a virus-infected female mosquito has an unquenchable appetite for warm blood. From the moment the virus is deposited under the skin through the mosquito’s infected saliva, a tough battle ensues.

The first battle for the virus is to adapt to a typically much hotter setting than the ambient environment – the human body temperature of around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celcius) or higher.

Then, the virus must evade the host’s immediate defenses, which includes physical barriers, such as layers of skin and mucosa, as well as immune cells that detect and attack invading microbes. Once in the bloodstream, the virus faces the adaptive arm of the human immune system, which is capable of targeting specific viral components with exquisite precision, like a biological sniper.

Once the EEE virus reaches the central nervous system – the brain and spinal cord – the immune system can overreact to the infection and inadvertently cause inflammation and damage nerve cells. This can lead to serious long-term effects, such as cognitive impairment.

To persist in this hostile human environment, the virus uses various survival strategies. One technique is creating new mutations on its surface and shape-shifting to avoid immune detection. Another strategy is to hijack human cells to replicate itself, such as using the cell’s machinery to synthesize new viral components and altering how the cell regulates division.

As viruses adapt to overcome immune defenses, both humans and mosquitoes evolve countermeasures to fight infection. The greater complexity of the human immune system makes it especially challenging for viruses to survive and spread between human hosts.

From human to human?

Like many other arboviruses, the EEE virus cannot be transmitted from person to person, which effectively limits its spread among human populations. Your body keeps the virus contained. Consequently, when the EEE virus infects people via the bite from an infected mosquito, it is considered a dead end, as it cannot escape its human host or infect another bloodthirsty mosquito.

So, what does the virus that causes EEE gain by infecting people? Not likely anything. A mosquito-borne virus like the Togavirus that causes EEE prefers its established transmission cycle between mosquitoes and birds. Human infections occur only when a mosquito deviates from its typical menu of birds.

EEE spreads more easily between mosquitoes and birds than it does in humans, which helps explain why human infections don’t happen very often. Thankfully, human bodies simply aren’t the virus’s currently preferred environment.

Lee Rafuse Haines, Associate Research Professor of Molecular Parasitology and Medical Entomology, University of Notre Dame and Pilar Pérez Romero, Associate Professor of Virology, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jonas Gamso, Arizona State University

“No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” observed Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in his 1999 book “Development as Freedom.”

My recent research doesn’t tackle Sen’s central argument – premised on the belief that democratic leaders prioritize food security because they cannot win reelection if the most basic needs of their constituents are not met – head on. Instead, I explored an auxiliary question: Do democratic governments cope better than their autocratic counterparts when their countries are confronted by sudden drops in food aid?

The answer is a resounding “yes.”

I came to that conclusion by analyzing food insecurity data from 110 countries from 2000 to 2020.

Food aid – a form of international assistance in which donors give food, or funds to buy food, to low- or middle-income countries – has recently fallen, reaching fewer people in 2024 than in 2023, according to estimates from the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. Major donors like Germany and the United States have reduced or suspended aid, citing budgetary constraints or concerns about theft, including to some of the neediest countries, such as Afghanistan, Haiti and Ethiopia. Adding to concerns, the Trump administration has signaled that it may move to “close down” the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the largest provider of global food assistance.

At the same time, the world has faced a significant hunger crisis since 2019 due to a combination of factors, including the impacts of civil conflict, climate change and stubbornly high prices.

I wanted to determine whether food aid cuts and rising hunger are connected, and if democracy matters. I started by cataloging instances when countries had experienced significant reductions in food aid inflows. I then looked at whether those “aid shocks” were followed by upticks in food insecurity, using data from the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization. Finally, I assessed whether the relationship between aid shocks and food insecurity varied across countries and political systems.

The results indicate that autocracies experience heightened food insecurity when sharp cuts to international food assistance occur, whereas democracies keep their people fed.

For example, autocratic Eswatini, an absolute monarchy in southern Africa that was formerly known as Swaziland, experienced a food aid shock in 2010 that was followed by a 2 percentage point uptick in the prevalence of undernourishment. In contrast, when Mongolia, a robust democracy, experienced an aid shock in 2007, undernourishment actually declined by about 3 percentage points.

On the one hand, this isn’t entirely surprising, as democratic leaders – unlike their autocratic counterparts – have to face the public in national elections, and winning is difficult when people are experiencing widespread hunger. Because leaders in a democracy are more accountable to their citizens, they make more of an effort to make up for the lost aid or cushion the adverse effects of food aid shocks on their populations.

On the other hand, democracies often struggle to move quickly, due to their complex policymaking processes and checks and balances. This may lead some to conclude that it is harder for them to move nimbly during a foreign aid crisis.

Why it matters

While many question the effectiveness of aid, including food aid, my findings suggest that cutting it – as some critics suggest – will have negative effects on the health and well-being of vulnerable people around the world. Already, food systems experts have expressed fears over the Trump administration’s proposed aid freezes and the potential breaking up of USAID.

For this reason, donor nations should be cautious about halting or rapidly shifting their foreign giving.

At the same time, donor governments, which are mostly Western democracies, have often used aid as a tool for promoting democratic institutions, at times cutting off aid to autocratic countries that abuse human rights. While this practice seems sensible to donors that wish to punish or discourage autocrats, my findings raise a significant concern: People living in autocratic countries may be left starving when aid is withdrawn.

And donor nations could take further steps to support democratization and democratic resilience, particularly in countries that are vulnerable to food insecurity. For example, donors can engage with civil society groups in aid-recipient nations, empowering them with tools and techniques to promote, protect and preserve democratic institutions. This way, countries will be more resilient and less likely to fall into crisis levels of hunger if and when aid cuts occur.

What’s next

While there is a tendency to treat governments as either “democratic” or “autocratic,” that approach obscures a good deal of nuance. Democracies vary in terms of their rules, procedures and governing structures. Likewise, autocracies can differ greatly from one another, with military regimes, personalist dictatorships and party-based autocracies each having unique characteristics.

Moving forward, I hope to dig into these varieties of democracy and autocracy to see how countries representing each respond to aid shocks.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Jonas Gamso, Associate Professor and Deputy Dean of Knowledge Enterprise for the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.